Month: February 2007

Now that I’ve been using FeedDemon for a while, I built up a collection of flagged but abandon posts. So I’ve decided to dump them, add what I can remember about why it was flag worthy, and then clear my flagged list. So I can dump it again later.. So in order of Feeds I pay the most attention to

Frank Arrigo
Very Cool Windows Live Writer Plugin : Insert Website Image – a post about a great sounding plugin, to capture webpages, for display in blog posts. Not yet installed but I plan on it.
MIX University – A bunch of links for Windows developed video’s, demo’s and lab’s. Mostly interested in the Windows Presentation Foundation, and WPF/E parts.

Neil Roodyn
The 8/12 Gut Buster – an exercise method that sounds very similar to a running training method taught at high school, sprint one lamppost, jog two.
The Value Of My Knowledge Is Knowing Where to Hit It – This post real hit home with me. I really like the story. I’m a story kind of guy, but more over I liked the reinforcement of the collecting information/titbits as a valued work style. I love listening to others problems, just to hear what they are doing, what they have tried, why that didn’t work, what they are going to try next.

Seth Godin
Apologies, ranked – A great piece on customer relations.
“Sorry” – Another great post on empowering others to feel better.

Jeff Atwood
Boyd’s Law of Iteration – Another great story, I’m such a sucker for a nice metaphor
Stylesheets for Print and Handheld – Some great titbits on styling your website for non-standard display/mediums.

Jessica Hagy
Juvenile. – A jolly funniest blog, and this was on top form. Sometimes you realized your not the sharpest tool when it takes 5 seconds to get the seconds meaning to a joke (like this one did), but I did get to laugh twice, and now a third time at my slowness.

Steve Yegge
Math For Programmers – I liked this as it’s encouraging to keep learning. Also I’ve done some extension my maths understanding since school. There is really so much beauty is maths, is just get access to it.
Moore’s Law is Crap – A great post about stretching your self, doing the hard things, because that’s how you get better.

Alex Henderson
WiX shortcuts… – Another little nugget. I have plan to upgrade our installer at work to use WiX over InstallShield. Yes I only just got it all working in InstallShield, but it’s voodoo, and also a classic setup.exe installer, thus will not work on Vista machines if I understand correctly.

Mark Carroll
Kiwibank – Using .NET 3.0 to quietly get on with it – A good story with a white paper I plan to read at some point.

Wes Dyer
About Queries – Another rainy day author like Steve Yegge. But this post is a great summary page to some of his other post.
How Linq to Objects Queries Work – A great post about delayed evaluation. It really helped get my head around functional programming type features.

There have been many others that should be on the list, but I lost focus on the point of flagging things. Hopefully this will act as a better store for interesting things. Almost like the large collection of bookmarks that I have that you just come across, and will look into when time presents itself….

The highlight for me was the Rule Engine demo. As at work we are about to built a configuration tool, with the configuration elements defined in XML, but what I hadn’t solved was how to manage the dependency rules, and relations between elements. Ta-da problem solved.

The plan is to build at runtime a class that has properties per element, like enabled, mandatory. Then the rules XML can be loaded, and as elements are set, the related elements can be disable, or flagged as mandatory. Then the UI can be data bound to the dynamic property object, for displaying the changed state.

Oh, I’m just so excited. Now I have to download and prototype that general case and see how it goes. All up, I’m very excited!

I picked up Learn to Program (a fantastic book) from the library a few weeks ago, and have enjoyed reading it in the evenings. Chris has the best mix of humour and tempo in a beginners programming books I’ve ever read. Maybe it’s because Rudy doesn’t have the baggage, most procedural languages have. I even passed the book to my wife (a confessed computer disliker) to read, as I thought Chris has so well captured the context of problem been described.

The books it targeted at the beginner, and stays well to this course, but at the end block’s and proc’s are shown, so you get a feel of the power/elegance Ruby has.

Yesterday was our seventh anniversary. How time flies when you’re having fun. Others things over this period I can recall as taking their time and been painful, but being married to Michaela has never been one of those.

We stayed just out of Akaroa at Onuku Farm Hostel in one of their Stargazers wooden tents. These things are very cool. A wooden A-frame with glass above your head. So you get to gaze at the stars. It was partially overcast when we went to sleep, but I awoke in the night to one of the best views ever. Best of all, I was warm in bed. Combo!

I saw three shooting stars, zero satellites and a “new” star constellation! I swear it was a perfect dog shape. It was hard to go too sleep, when I felt I should keep looking, because I could and it was so pretty.